by Adam Leigh
We laughed a lot together at the daily absurdity of our hunt for glory. With sarcasm to PhD level, we could have held a masterclass in answering questions with a facetious quip. We revelled in the crazy people we encountered along the way. Particularly children’s entertainers. Often, we’d sit with a glass of wine at the end of the week and have a competition to see who could find the entertainer with the silliest name. Mr Dangle from Wolverhampton was usually the winner.
Julian and I enjoyed each other’s company on a superficial level of banter and debate about the business. What we could not muster was intimacy. There was absolutely no discussion about what we did in those rare moments outside the office and he never mentioned his family, which was strange in the context of a business that required some understanding of the rigours of parenting. I would occasionally ask him how Catherine was getting on at work and he would curtly respond ‘fine’ and move on to another topic.
There was no actual need to share details of our domestic lives and our days were sufficiently busy without the requirement of personal revelation. I was not that surprised when on an ordinary Wednesday morning, as I sat at my desk sipping my first and most crucial coffee, Julian emerged from the lift dragging two enormous suitcases. Silently he moved to the furthest corner of the office and placed them behind some boxes. He motioned for me to join him in The Bored Room. With a furtive glance towards the office, he shut the door and rather formally asked me to sit down.
“Alex, I want you to know that I’ve left Catherine.” He was strangely detached, as if informing me of something mundane like that he had booked a holiday or was moving home.
“I’m so sorry, Julian. Are you OK?” He looked at me with curiosity and clearly thought I had asked him a remarkably irrelevant and patronising question.
“I’m terrific. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, call me old-fashioned, but splitting from one’s spouse can sometimes be something of a wrench?”
“Not for me, I assure you. I’ve outgrown Catherine. I’ll always be grateful for our time together and we have three lovely children. But Alex, you must have had a sense that she wasn’t the one who was going to help me get where I need to.”
“In truth, it always seemed to be a bit of a strain when you were together, but it wasn’t my place to comment about your relationship. Where will you go?”
‘I’m moving in with a friend.” His curt delivery clearly conveyed that there was no scope for further conversation about his future whereabouts. I changed tack and asked, with some trepidation, the obvious question.
“What about the children?”
“What about the children? They’re little, they’re robust. This is unfortunate for them, but not cataclysmic.”
“How often will you see them?”
“Really, Alex? How often do you see your kids these days? What’s so unusual? I will see them plenty and intend to be the model of a civilised and involved parent as long as Catherine tones down the wailing banshee routine a bit. I would do anything for them. Plus, consider this, Superdad. We’re hitching our fortune to delivering a parenting solution. Did it not occur to you that understanding single parents would be important too? I’m doing us all a favour by becoming the company expert on the subject.”
I didn’t want to respond to his last point as it filled me with a tinge of sadness. I am pretty conventional and felt fortunately secure in my marriage to Sarah, to the point that imagining us splitting up was impossible. Besides, while I knew it wasn’t my place to comment, my sympathies were instinctively with Catherine. He had not really shown her much affection or consideration. Julian was sly and clearly wasn’t moving in with elderly Mrs Scroggins who ran a boarding house for lonely single men. Maybe he wasn’t going to the gym all the time after all?
When I told Sarah later that day, she was a little more forthright in her assessment of the marital decline. “What a total bastard he is. ‘I’ve outgrown Catherine.’ Who talks like that about a relationship?” I was reticent to commit to an opinion, for fear of giving the wrong one. I knew she equated my business partnership with Julian to his marriage with Catherine. If he was mean to her, it was inevitable that he would behave the same way to me. As we lay in bed that night, a sleeping baby between us, I actually felt rather secure and able to believe that Julian’s transgressions were irrelevant to the state of our business relationship.
Sarah, unaccustomed to me not offering an opinion, looked at me quizzically for a long time. Silence was most unfamiliar. Eventually, I could take the absence of conversation no more and said, “All right, Sarah. I’ve clearly done something wrong. But if I have, I’m struggling to know what.”
“Relax, Alex. I’m pretty confident that Julian managed to have an affair and leave his three babies without any help from you.”
“It’s very nice of you to say so. I do my best not to wreck homes.”
“Well, how do you think you’re doing with this home?” She turned towards me and gave me a very specific stare that behoved me to answer the question honestly. As if I would try to spin things. When I spoke, my tone sounded needlessly defensive.
“Fair question, I suppose. I know I’m distracted and not around as much as I’d like, but I’m doing my best to keep the plates spinning.”
“The trouble is, a spinning plate, if not constantly turned, eventually smashes. Wow, I’m even beginning to talk in clichés like you.” She carried on wistfully. “Alex, I’m so excited that you’re trying to achieve what you’ve always wanted. Really, I am. And of course I’m not going to stop supporting you. But be nice along the way. Julian isn’t nice. I just don’t want his values to rub off on you in how you treat people.”
Julian leaves his wife, and I’m in trouble for bad plate-spinning. It seemed unfair. As I saw it, I was doing everything I could to create future choices. Professional failure terrified me more than personal absence from the family. I’m not proud of this sentiment, but I knew that Sarah was there to prop us all up. The trouble was, I never really checked with her if that was what she wanted to do. I assumed that any ambition Sarah had for her own advancement at work was less important than mine. She saw Julian’s unhappy marriage as a sign that those who want to achieve more may also want more in their personal life. This did not apply to me, but my proximity to Julian unsettled her.
The conversation was becoming uncomfortable and the moment anything serious required confronting, I elegantly segued elsewhere. Sensing it might be safe to move on, I rubbed my hands together with exaggerated enthusiasm and asked my beautiful but emotionally neglected wife this impressive question: “Let’s speculate a bit. Who do you think he’s shacked up with?”
Clearly, Sarah did not feel compelled to answer. She turned her back on me and gathered up the duvet, before switching off her light.
***
Family was always the most important thing I could have imagined in my life. Suddenly, however, I had two of them to deal with. There was my real one and there was my business clan. It wasn’t that I loved them equally, but I had emotional commitments to both. A growing office of people, sharing the same outlook, generated significant emotional demands that sometimes overtook the everyday needs of relatives, who you inherited rather than recruited.
My sister and I, for example, had always been each other’s closest confidants. We were very different personalities bonded by the atavistic need to protect each other. It just so happened that as I started my business, she embarked on the most daunting period of her career. As she became CEO of Better Futures, the Syrian refugee crisis worsened at a truly alarming rate, with over 1.5 million by 2013. She was spending huge amounts of time providing support and protection for children in camps on the Turkish border and was rarely in the country. She ended an embryonic relationship, her first for some time, because she was rigidly focused on saving lives and refused to put her own future ahead of her quest.
My parents worried about her terribly, but it was mingled with enormous pride in her
pure desire to alleviate suffering. While they never said it directly, it was not hard to see why they were reluctant to endorse my efforts with the same enthusiasm. I was involved in something without a noble purpose and concurrently was ignoring the important people in my life, who they felt I didn’t appreciate. It was the opposite for Judith. She was engaged in something worthwhile, potentially to the detriment of her own personal happiness.
When I look back on all of this, I can see it just made me more driven. I adored my sister, but I could not compete with her altruism. I was going to show those closest to me that I was very impressive and clever. If my parents made little asides about my absence to stir up my guilt, I’m afraid it just made me commit to spending more time in the office, proving to them my own worth.
There was a chance I would not make it into heaven after all.
11. Board Meeting
After eighteen months of eventful trading, buoyed with optimism, I strode purposefully into the office braced for the day ahead. My arrival was announced to everyone several moments before by the mechanical drone of our clunky goods lift, straining the last few inches of its journey with geriatric effort. Bursting with the energy of its fifty-five ambitious employees, the office was nearly full. It was messy and conveyed a sense of chaotic creativity that, while appropriate for a start-up, was rather tiresome if you wanted to find something. I am a stickler for order, which basically made me a conservative old fart in the eyes of my team of millennials when I asked them to tidy up.
I grabbed a coffee from our kitchen, which looked like a student flat after a raucous party. I was practically a barista by now, having used the Gaggia chrome monster we inherited with the space so much. Unlike everyone else, I always cleaned it afterwards, wiping the steam nozzle and shouting to no one in particular: ‘Do you want a pastry with that?’
In The Bored Room, Alice and Simon were putting the finishing touches to a presentation, hunched over a laptop, their mutual disdain clearly visible as they tried to co-operate. Julian had his feet on the table and swivelled from side to side on one of our flimsy, cheap meeting chairs. He was on the phone and he gestured for me to approach as if inviting me into my own meeting room. He finished his call and sat up.
“Are we all set for the board meeting?” he asked cursorily. I resented the implication that I was readying things for him. Simon, ever loyal to his mate, looked up from his typing and quipped, “We will be once Lady Thatcher next to me allows me to do my job.”
Alice bristled and clenched her fists to calm her anger. She hated Simon’s cavalier disregard, not to mention his blatant sexism. They came to blows regularly and over the last few months I’d had to make sure that they spent as little time together as possible, which was tricky as she was running our operation and managing the budget was a significant part of her responsibilities. Julian subtly supported Simon’s disregard for any vestige of appropriate behaviour and continually defended our finance director from censure.
Today was a big day. We were expecting Moshe Shalon and Lord Dobson within the hour. This was the first time we had met in our office, normally using a meeting room in whichever hotel Moshe was staying at that week.
We had a positive story to tell our investors and I wanted to show off the energy in the office. We could ill afford a display of internal rancour among the management team. I whispered discreetly to Alice: “Ignore Simon. He can’t talk to you like that. Please let’s finalise our presentation in peace. We’ll deal with him after.”
Julian jumped to his feet, ready for battle, and declaimed: “Children, can we concentrate on the good news. For the next few hours, we need to come across as if we all want to socialise outside the office.”
Practical and expedient as ever, Alice snorted with evident irony and continued to type on her laptop.
***
We started the meeting punctually.
There had been much amusement and bewilderment from the team outside when the two separate security details arrived in advance to sweep the office. What they were looking for was ambiguous, as there seemed to be no natural vantage points for snipers, and the most lethal weapon in our collective possession was a pizza slicer we used when we ordered late-night takeaway. Even more amusingly, while Moshe’s team were always going to be from his home country, it transpired that George Dobson would now only entrust his protection to Israelis too. The office reverberated with the sound of people speaking Hebrew into lapel mikes as our harsh spotlights bounced intermittently off the frames of identical dark glasses.
George and Moshe had hitherto seemed to get on very well. The few times we had been together, they would greet each other with a familiarity that was unexpected and usually they would sit somewhere quietly, talking conspiratorially with their heads so close they almost touched. There was a lot of nodding and it seemed they had a respect for one another that was very real but also intensely private.
Our board included Jane Thomas, one of the investment partners from iSeed. She struggled to have any relationship with either of the other major investors, who seemed to resent her presence at these meetings and would ignore her completely. As a consequence, she was pretty benign to date in her scrutiny. The meetings in those days did not take long. We were expected to give a concise overview of our performance against an agreed plan and to identify funding needs going forward. They seemed to want headlines, not exhaustive detail, and we were happy to minimise the amount of preparatory work we had to do.
Already, in eighteen months we had exceeded my expectations. 200,000 registered to the site and paying a subscription. 2,500 sellers recruited across the country. Revenue of nearly £30,000 a month. We had enough cash in the bank for at least six months and we were about to embark on raising some more investment. Even more miraculously, we were delivering the numbers we had anticipated when we drew up our initial plan.
I was outlining the plan for growth for the next year when Moshe stood up and gestured for me to stop talking. Perhaps more a command with his hand than a gesture, on reflection.
“Guys, I am troubled.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Julian answered. “What’s troubling you?”
“Your numbers are wrong.”
“I really don’t think they are,” chipped in Simon with his usual self-belief. I looked at Alice, who subtly nodded in agreement with Moshe.
“Don’t make it worse, please,” Moshe continued, as if gathering evidence for a future appearance in court. Instinctively, Julian turned to George for approbation but was met with nothing other than the brief statement: “I can’t abide sloppiness.” Moshe stared back at Simon. Within thirty seconds, what had been a seemingly effortless update on our positive performance started to unravel.
“Where are they wrong?” I ventured. I had long worried about the sloppiness of Simon’s work. Numbers seemed not to be his thing, perhaps an Achilles heel for an ambitious finance director. Moshe, who had been assiduously note-taking during our presentation, told Simon to get out of his seat so that he could control the computer, which was being projected on to a large TV screen. Simon reluctantly got up and for the first time since I’d met him, he looked apprehensive. Moshe scrolled straight to a chart with revenue projections. Simon had made a multiplication mistake and clearly this had inflated the final figure.
“Incompetent… Agreed?” We all nodded obediently at Moshe. Simon looked at his feet as if he’d been given a detention.
“There is more.” Moshe was just warming up. He found two other figures that were wrong. There was a zero missing on the figure for the hosting of our site. There was also a formula mistake on the final profit chart, which meant that we were making less money than we had presented. The silence that descended was not golden but decidedly awkward. I could not believe that I had missed these mistakes when we reviewed the presentation late the night before. I was not surprised that super-smooth Simon could make such basic errors, but I was angry that I had not called him out for this previously.
Julian spoke first.
“You’re right. We’ll correct these mistakes and they will not happen again. Now, let’s please move on.” He was taking this very personally and did not want to engage in further debate. Moshe had the air of someone who was enjoying every minute of the debacle, while pretending to be externally furious. I suspected that he loved these demonstrations of his brilliance and wanted both applause and retribution. He was good, clearly very good, at maths.
“I want an action that will ensure this never happens again,” he demanded. Execution not rehabilitation, clearly. No one replied.
“What my learned friend is saying,” George Dobson continued, “is that we cannot have our money mismanaged through basic arithmetical mistakes. If you get it wrong on something this simple, how can we entrust you to manage your business when you have rich resources and deeper pockets?”
The message to us was clear, and a sacrifice was required to regain favourable support and patronage. The meeting concluded without incident, but I noticed every time I glanced at Alice that she was smiling.
***
“Let’s get rid of him now,” I shouted. It was a few hours after the meeting had adjourned. Julian had immediately headed out for what turned out to be a boozy lunch with George, as his cheeks were flushed when I confronted him on his return. We were alone among the detritus of coffee cups and biscuits from the meeting in The Bored Room. I observed that our policy of having children’s snacks to reflect our culture needed reviewing. A full plate of Jamie Dodgers and Iced Gems had failed to impress a major tech mogul and a peer of the realm. Julian swivelled on his chair, checking his messages on his phone. He was clearly not going to make the conversation easy.
“Simon has to go. He’s useless. He has no attention to detail and is so slapdash. I checked his qualifications properly the other week. He hasn’t got any proper ones. I know he’s charming, but he’s basically rubbish at his job.” Julian was petulantly silent. “I don’t care if he is your friend and I don’t care if you have some establishment code of honour I don’t understand. He’s a liability.”